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Jim Brett’s Three-Dimensional Diary

Jim Brett has figured out the elusive work/life balance. The president of West Elm — the international chain of 58 hip home-furnishings stores — he has seamlessly integrated the personal and professional by living across the street from the company’s headquarters in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn.

To get to his fifth-floor apartment, he takes a no-frills freight elevator, a simple steel platform that ascends through a drafty exposed-brick shaftway. The 3,000-square-foot three-bedroom loft is the ideal setting for Mr. Brett to demonstrate his theory of eclectic decorating, the hard-to-prescribe concept behind his rebranding of 11-year-old West Elm (a division of the San Francisco-based Williams-Sonoma), which he took charge of in 2010.

Mr. Brett, 44, honed his taste, and his expertise in merchandising a gentrified bohemian lifestyle to bourgeois consumers, while working as an executive for Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters in Philadelphia. “I wanted West Elm to be about helping people express their own personal style instead of buying a look,” he said, explaining how the stores mix industrial-inspired furnishings and contemporary upholstery with handcrafted ceramics and textiles from around the world. “We believe your home is your story, and we have this mix of ingredients to help you tell it.”

He practices what he preaches. “I can walk you through our house,” he said, “and the things tell the story of places we’ve been and love.”

Although Mr. Brett and his press-shy husband, Ed Gray, had lived in a 17-foot-wide townhouse in Philadelphia, they had enough furnishings to be able to outfit the loft almost completely, so they immediately felt at home in their new surroundings.

“Ed had a furniture store in Philadelphia called Bruges that he decided to close when I took this job,” Mr. Brett said. “He had a bunch of furniture that he was going to sell at liquidation prices, and I said, ‘We already own this furniture, so let’s pack it up and see how it looks in Brooklyn,’ and it all worked perfectly. The only major purchase we made was the dining table that would have been the size of our entire living room, dining room and kitchen in Philadelphia.”

The previous owners had renovated the loft with sensitivity. Their design highlighted the outsize wood beams and support columns that honor the 1894 building’s history, while adding a sleek cook’s kitchen, spa bathrooms and George Nelson pendant lights. “It was a dream for us,” said Mr. Brett, who rented the place for two years before buying it. “We happened to share the taste of the couple who lived here before us. We would have made the same choices.”

Having lived on a narrow block in Philadelphia where the residents tended a shared garden, Mr. Brett was worried about the anonymity of living in a neighborhood dense with high-rises, which is why he was drawn to his building, a condominium with just 15 units. “We’ve gotten to know everyone who lives here, which includes some of the artists and squatters who pioneered this neighborhood,” he said. “They’ve all become our friends.”

But Mr. Brett’s desire for a sense of community extends beyond the front door of his building. He decided that Dumbo would be the perfect place for West Elm, whose first store was located here, to test a second retail concept. “I’ve been obsessed for the past few years with the return to Main Street and reinventing the general store,” he said. “So we came up with West Elm Market, which sells housewares and serves La Colombe coffee, which is roasted in Philadelphia by my friend Todd Carmichael.”

The market opened across the street from his loft the week of Hurricane Sandy, and it immediately became a neighborhood hub because it was one of the few businesses that did not lose power. “We got extension cords and power strips so people could charge their cellphones and hang out,” he said. “We served free coffee, so it was kind of our opening party.”

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Living so close to work does have a downside. “I have a hard time sleeping because I have a hard time turning off my brain,” Mr. Brett said as he showed off the small TV room in his loft where he decompresses. “I watch a lot of TV — anything but reality shows. It’s my guilty pleasure and helps me disconnect.”

The den is furnished with West Elm’s Tillary sectional (all of the company’s sofas are named after streets in Brooklyn), along with a rug he and Mr. Gray bought on a trip to Turkey and a lamp made from a found-objects sculpture that they bought at the Brooklyn Flea.

Traveling and shopping are both business and pleasure, and the loft is like a three-dimensional diary. “I’m a ceramics junkie,” he said, picking up a bowl in the living room that he bought in Cape Town from an artist named Gemma Orkin. “She paints these birds and flowers in happy colors. Now we’ve taken her designs and put them onto pillows for West Elm.”

His favorite piece is a whimsical ceramic elephant by Shirley Fintz, another South African artist, whom he commissioned to make lamp bases for West Elm; they sold out. He is now auditioning the organic linens on his bed, which were made by Coyuchi, a California company. “There is a lot of crossover between work and home,” he said.

But there is not a lot of crossing over the two bridges that bookend his neighborhood. “We rarely go into Manhattan,” he said. “Our favorite restaurant is a little place called AlMar around the corner. The owner is named Marcello, and he knows us and we can show up at any time and get a great Bolognese.”

Although he sounds as though he was running for mayor of Dumbo, Mr. Brett is a citizen of the world who feels at home in Australia, Haiti, Nepal and South Africa. His conviction that publicly traded corporations can profit by acting responsibly was recently endorsed by a Commitment to Action with the Clinton Global Initiative: West Elm has promised to pay $35 million through 2015 to artisans in 15 countries who use handcrafted techniques.

He cites his living-room rug, handmade in India and sold at West Elm for $1,299, as an example of ethical merchandising. He says the company’s promise of steady work allows craftspeople to stay in their villages instead of moving to cities and going to work in factories. “Every rug is touched by over 20 people and takes over a week to make,” he said. “I want consumers to appreciate that.”

He certainly does. “I like that everything in our house has a story and a soulfulness,” he said. “I kind of live the dream of our company’s mission statement.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 15, 2013, on Page RE4 of the New York edition with the headline: The Three-Dimensional Diary. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe